Law: Custody rebels lose appeal

Trish Wilson has published a letter from an advocate for the fathers' rights movement who fled to the Dominican Republic, after abducting his son. The man, who claims to be a psychic, says jail is a good place for meditation. But, he doesn't seem to have found enlightenment.

Poor Lowell Jaks. Here he is, sitting in jail, trying to pass himself off as the Martyr For Fathers' Rights, and he has had no visitors. Hardly anyone has written to him, even after fathers' rights activists posted his mailing address at jail on their mailing lists. His Alliance For Non-Custodial Parents Rights (ANCPR) buddies have given him a wide birth. This letter he penned from behind bars has appeared on a fathers' rights mailing list that will go unnamed. I have the original in my back-up files. As expected, he shows no remorse for kidnapping his son and spiriting him away to the Dominican Republic, all in the name of fathers' rights. He wrote that "self centered, self absorbed, hedonism, consumerism" blocks one off from what is real. It's ironic that all of that is what got him in trouble in the first place.

Get a load of this claim of his - that the "no fault" divorce "industry" exists for one purpose: "to legitimate adultery by women."

You've gotta be kidding me.

I have been following a similar situation for years, including observing some of the proceedings in court. Brian and Ruth Christine kidnapped their daughters at gunpoint from Child and Family Services employees who were returning them to a foster home after a rare visit in 2001. The parents had been accused of neglect and abuse. One child had a fractured skull. The main problem was malnutrition. The children weighed less than half their proper weights. Mom and Dad had used food as a reward, much as one does when training a dog. The Christines were on the lam for about a week, with help from a wealthy benefactor. The parents became a cause celebre in some Right Wing circles and were represented by Edgar Steele. He is a leader in the neo-Confederate and Holocaust denial movements. (Among many other strange things, Steele believes there is a plot by state and federal governments to take Aryan children away from their conservative aparents and give them to 'muds' and liberals.)

The kidnapping was achieved by stealing the van the caseworkers had been transporting the children in. Since the van was identifiable, they abandoned it after transferring to a car in another location. Steele had hoped to get the robbery conviction reversed. This week, an Oregon appellate court said no.

The News-Review has the story.

The Oregon Court of Appeals has upheld the convictions of Brian and Ruth Christine, who in 2001 snatched their children at gunpoint from social workers at a freeway rest area near Myrtle Creek.

The Christines were convicted of robbery, auto theft and custodial interference after taking their three young daughters by force. The children, who were in state protective custody following allegations they were malnourished, had been driven from their foster home in Bandon to visit with their parents in Grants Pass. The youngsters were grabbed during a stop on the way back to Bandon.

In their appeal, the Christines argued that the robbery convictions -- stemming from taking at gunpoint the state van the children were being transported in -- should be overturned. They argued they had possession of the van for only a few minutes before abandoning it in a gravel lot next to a lumber mill at Round Prairie, two miles north of the rest area.

The Christines are saying converting an object to their own use under threat of force isn't robbery if they abandon the object later. That is the kind of sophistry typical of Edgar Steele, who also represented the Aryan Nations in the civil trial over an assault on nonwhites who drove past their headquarters in Idaho. And, typically, he lost. The Court wasn't remotely inclined to smile on 'borrowing' the van. It appears that the argument that taking property from government workers doing their duties is acceptable -- if you abandon it later -- is as about as convincing as another one advocates of taking the law into one's hands in custody cases make: It is not possible to kidnap one's own child. It is, if one's right to custody is doubtful.

Both the Jaks and Christine cases show there are people who will endanger their children to prove a point about their presumed right to control them. I gather that Jaks, a radical member of a fathers' rights group, is the sort of person who influenced the Christines. They are a foolish couple, susceptible to manipulation by Steele and other extremists. A network of anti-government activists urged the Christines to defy the law and then melted away when indictments were being handed out. I doubt they've had many visitors in prison, either. Perhaps other people will learn from Brian and Ruth Christine's experience.

Read Lowell Jaks' entire letter at Trish Wilson's Weblog.

Reasonably related

•Edgar Steele, the lawyer who represents the Christines, made a previous appearance at Silver Rights in "Anti-Semite opposes war for wrong reasons." Read it.

•The Southern Poverty Law Center named Edgar Steele one of its top 40 extremists last year.

Note: A correction and additional information. Lowell Jaks took his child to the Dominican Republic after abducting him. Jaks was extradicted and is incarcerated in California. The boy has been returned to his mother.

The trouble with fathers' rights

The research I did into the National Fatherhood Iniative's bus ads targeting black fathers led to some correspondence from persons involved in the fathers' rights movement. Among the material I was sent was a link to an article that asserts 60 to 80 percent of claims of domestic abuse against men who become noncustodial parents are made up. That is the kind of propaganda that makes the fathers' rights movement conspicuously dubious. Domestic abuse is a well-documented and widespread problem. Furthermore, since most allegations of abuse occur before a father is barred from contact and/or divorced, retaliation for the breakup cannot be a motivation as these people suggest. Noticeably missing from the article are any citations to alleged studies supporting what its author, talk show host Glenn Sacks, says.

A father who claims to have been picked on by the system was sentenced to a half-century in prison this week. His complaints relate to not having been allowed to see his four sons after he was charged with raping his preteen daughter.

A father was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison Wednesday for raping his 11-year-old daughter, who later hung herself.

Timothy Lucie, 46, stood stoically as Onondaga County Judge William Walsh imposed back-to-back sentences of 25 years to life for his conviction on first-degree rape and first-degree sodomy charges.

Lucie said nothing before Walsh sentenced him. His wife, Andrea Lucie, hurried from the courtroom in tears, refusing to talk to reporters. She testified in her husband's defense.

. . .Lucie was accused of sexually assaulting his daughter, Valerie, in the shower at their Syracuse home Sept. 30. Hours later her 8-year-old brother found her hanging from her bedpost by a dog collar and leash in what police said was an apparent suicide.

Like many abusers, Lucie exercises an iron will over his family. No one, not even grandparents or cousins, would speak on Valerie's behalf. One of her teachers offered the only memorial to her doing the sentencing phase. Her mother, Andrea, has been a steadfast supporter of Timothy Lucie. If the mother fits the pattern in incest cases, she will have known of the abuse of Valerie long before the child's suicide.

The trouble with the fathers' rights movement is that it likely encompasses a significant proportion of men who have done hideous things to women and children and lie about their history. Lucie's protest is that he is the head of his family and the system has no business meddling in how he runs it. I've also heard of cases involving 'Christian' fathers who cite Biblical authority for rape, assault and even murder. And, there is always the 'the bitch set me up' alibi. Until the men in the fathers' rightsmovement eliminate abusers of women and children from their ranks, I doubt most Americans will sympathize with it.

I hope you will take time to read the full news story about the sentencing of the man who caused Valerie Lucie's death -- her father. Strangers will have to remember who was the victim and who is the perpetrator since her family won't.

Dean Esmay dissembles about race

A couple readers have asked me about my brief reference to Dean Esmay in a note to part two of the series on the National Fatherhood Initiative's ads lambasting black fathers. I mentioned Esmay because he is one of the people consulted by Juliette Ochieng, Baldilocks, about the ads. I am troubled by that because I do not believe he is someone who should be dispensing advice about anything having to do with race. I haven't been a reader of Esmay's blog entries, finding them stem winders that usually say next to nothing. However, from time to time, people send me citations to reprehensible entries about race Esmay has made. The pattern is for Esmay to falsely represent some aspect of Southern history involving African-Americans. Let's review some of those entries.

Last fall, Esmay told a whopper about the history of lynching. He claimed that the very Southern practice was not regional and did not have much, if anything, to do with race. Wyatt Ruthven, of the Wyatt Wire, an excellent researcher, debunked that inane effort to rewrite history.

Jeff Quinton has been linking to some Dean Esmay entries on Southern race relations, and I am NOT impressed.

You have to read through a long rambling spiel about how whites in Chicago didn't really hate Howard Washington (even the ones that called him the N-word). After that demonstration of logic, it really shouldn't surprise me that Esmay should launch into a riff about how lynching wasn't a Southern problem.Ain't it funny how we have that word, "lynching," for when southerners do that stuff? But I gotta ask: is there any evidence that racial killings were ever--I mean ever--less common in the North? If so, I've yet to see it. Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that racial killings were more common up north 50 years ago than they were in the South. We just never had a word for it, and having the word makes it seem worse somehow. Why, I don't know. Because it shouldn't.

Ain't it funny how a 2 second Google Search brings up this page of statistics on lynching that Dean Esmay has spent a lifetime searching for in vain?

The site breaks down lynchings by state and race from 1882 to 1968, as compiled by the Tuskeegee Institute.

Lynchings in all 50 United States
White Victims: 1297
Black Victims: 3446
Total Victims: 4743

Lynchings in the 11 states of the Old Confederacy
White: 492
Black: 3029
Total: 3521


So the Old South accounted for 74 percent of all lynchings in America and 88 percent of lynchings where the victims were black.

Ain't it funny how people never seem to look very hard for facts that might prove them wrong?

There is no ambiguity in the data. Nor do I think that anyone educated to or beyond high school has any reason to believe that lynching occurred as often in the North as in the South, or that whites were lynched as often as blacks. Lynching was a form of control used to keep African-Americans submissive during and after Reconstruction. Most Americans, including most Southerners, know who was lynched and why. The only reason I can think of for someone to misrepresent the nature of lynching is a determined desire to mislead. I believe Esmay purposely set out to distribute false information about lynching in the blogosphere to further his campaign to paint a rosy and unrealistic picture of the South.

Just three days later, Ruthven had to take Esmay to task, again. Esmay published an entry claiming te the Southern Strategy does not exist. Those of us who know anything about American politics, know the Southern Strategy, attracting white Southern voters to the Republican Party, began during the massive resistance movement against desegregation. (I'm sure Esmay will claim there was no massive resistance, as well, but, again, he will be lying.) Ruthven gave that big lie short shrift.

PART II: Now that I seem to have gotten Dean Esmay's attention, I figure I might as well refute the other idiotic statement he made about Southern Race Relations, namely:

This should have showed anyone who was paying attention what the "southern strategy" really was, and that it really was not about race. But the critics said that this was all fake, and that it was "really" about racism after all.

The Southern Strategy WASN'T about race? Hoo boy, that's rich. Of course it's not like actual Southern political strategists of the era have written voluminous mea culpas about how they deliberately played up racial tensions in order to win Republican votes.

Oh wait, Here's Hastings Wyman:

Later, from 1967 through 1972, I served as legislative assistant to Sen. Thurmond. In 1970, I took a six-month leave of absence to manage the South Carolina gubernatorial campaign of Republican congressman Albert Watson. I was still a segregationist, comfortable with the racial politics of both Thurmond and Watson. Only months before the campaign started, Watson gave an anti-school integration speech in the small town of Lamar. Several days later, segregationists turned over a school bus bringing black children to Lamar's formerly white school.

Today, I cringe when I think of that campaign, not so much because of anything I remember Watson saying -- he had plenty of company in Deep South politics at that time -- but because I remember what I did. The campaign, with my knowledge and participation, stressed opposition to school integration and to "the bloc vote," i.e., black voters who voted heavily Democratic. The race issue was the major focus of the campaign, one we used in television spots and more graphically in leaflets mailed anonymously to white voters in precincts that George Wallace had carried in the 1968 presidential election. Despite our best efforts, moderate Democrat John C. West won.

I suppose he wasn't paying close enough attention.

Anyone aware of the history of Southern racial relations, the GOP or national politics for the last five decades, knows the Southern Strategy is real and based on race. Nor does one need to look far to see it in action. The so-called Solid South would not exist without it.

Esmay was at it again when the fact segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond had fathered a daughter with a black woman became public last year. He claimed that the wily old schemer had treated Essie Mae Washington well and that the denial of paternity was meant to ''protect' Washington, not to allow Thurmond to continue his long career as an obstructionist to racial equality. My response would have been bull----, if I were giving to cursing.

Esmay goes on to say: "I don't suppose this woman would resent having her father, who she apparently had a good relationship with, referred to that way, Sandra."

I must take issue with that. A good relationship? According to reports, Ms. Essie's teenaged mother had to rely on black neighbors to support the baby. Later, she sent the girl to live with relatives because she couldn't manage on her own. Thurmond did not acknowledge the child until she was well into her teens. The amounts of money he gave her over the years were small. Seems to me that she is just as deserving of a part of his estate as his white offspring. The entire relationship was based on his manipulation and dehumanization of her.

I believe what Esmay means is that such shoddy treatment is good enough for a woman 'tainted' with West African ancestry. I haven't cited his weblog because I consider him little better than a hood-wearing Klansman.

It is ironic that Dean Esmay was consulted about an issue he had already weighed in on previously in regard to Thurmond -- how a father should treat a black child. Apparently, disowning one's offspring and providing support only after the child is nearly grown, and then as hush money, are commendable behaviors. Esmay said so. That is why this entry is following the previous two. The people behind the bus ads, administrators at Right Wing foundations and the National Fatherhood Initiative, are conservative white males. A bunch of Dean Esmays, one could say. The people whose intimate relationships they wish to control most, apparently, are minority women. The arrangement they envision harkens back to slavery, when slave masters told black women who they could mate with and when. Slave owners also determined the amount of contact between related slaves, if any. Such behavior denies the people involved autonomy. I don't think it is an aspect of history that needs to be revisited.

In reviewing these and other entries by Esmay about race one reads the typical claims from the neo-Confederate movement. The pre-Civil War South was not a bad place. White Southerners had affection for blacks, until they started getting uppity. Lynching did not really happen or occurred mainly in the North. There's no Southern Strategy. I do not know whether Esmay is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the League of the South, or the Council of Conservative Citizens. But, his views match theirs. Esmay is one of their voices in the blogosphere.